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THE FAMILY HOMESTEADING PRINCIPLE

If you mix your time and labour with something that nobody owns you gain ownership of it. This process starts in the womb and in the first couple of years after birth as you homestead your body while learning to move, speak, think and so act*1.

Later on in life, one can homestead anything that isn't owned. Sadly this does not usually include squatting, as whatever edifice is being squatted usually has an owner. If it is owned, you are trespassing.

Your right to property is the exclusive right to use whatever the thing is that is your property; whether your house, clothes, furniture, computer. This right can be argued to exist because we have free will, desires, and a world that we act in, both alone and in concert with others. You smash all that together and people need clear lines to tell who gets to use what and where, and what land they can claim.

Humans don't like conflict and violence because it introduces them to the risk of harm. They'd much rather agree on a way to get along, even if many individual desires will be frustrated by this, at least the frustrated individuals will still be alive.

So homesteading is how property justifiably comes into being. But Matt, that's not what actually happened! Well, no. That's because these brigands called Kings took the land for themselves and then parcelled it out to their lieutenants. The more useful the lieutenant, the more land he got.

Does this sound like an indictment of the private sector / civil society? Surely people in a free society would just contract with each other for more things than is currently the case. And that way the scourge of socialisation would be held at bay forever.

So today we've established that homesteading starts in the womb and so is a first principle of moral living. We've also established that moral living is more expedient than everybody immediately trying to steal from everybody else, as nobody wants to be the one that gets killed in the act.

People who fear Libertarianism because - according to them - it could cause chaos should remember that we all fear chaos, which is exactly why it won't happen when government is no more.

*1 - Remember that action here means to do things in the external world to satisfy needs in the immediate or distant future, like getting an education, or going to the bathroom. Both of those qualify since you could in theory just soil yourself in front of everyone. ANYWAY!

On the next Ecomony Blogtime; Matt proves conclusively that he is not a salmon.

EDIT; Correction to opening sentence; "time and labour" replaces "time, labour or money" since you can't pay an owner for something that is unowned. Poor absurd Matthew.

Do read the links in the order in which they appear please. Finding the right comments in the third link might be quite interesting. They are all by a user called BestTrousers and start with "RI" meaning R1.

The main argument used by HealthcareEconomist3 is to give a survey of several works, while BestTrousers goes for comparative advantage.

Hopefully you good folks can indulge me by forgiving this post. It is an unfinished mess because I wanted it out there as the anchor for a hyperlink from a Reddit thread.At the momebt everything below is a jumble of notes, but I will be reworking it bit by bit starting today.Hopefully this post will be sorted out and typed in full before the end of April 2017.

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Historical materialism is the idea that history progresses in stages - slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism, then communism - driven by changes in the technologies or techniques of production, and that any human civilisation will exemplify this process.

This makes historical materialism an exercise in both historicism and materialism.

Historicism is the idea that studying the past can reveal history's in-built course or narrative, and so show you the future.

Materialism is the idea that ideas ( and institutions) ultimately* don't matter in determining our destinies, and that therefore only material…

The idea that labor exploits capital is equally as plausible, sans assumptions*, as the idea that capital exploits labor. This is only intended as a response to the formal concept, descriptive or normative, of exploitation in Marx's schema from Capital Volume I.

* Assumptions include the power relation whereby capital is just assumed to be above labor hierarchically.

~ ~ Capital exploits labor because...
... Capital earns income from production done by labor that capital didn't perform
& ~ Labor exploits Capital because...
... Labor earns income from capital that labor didn't buy~
Basically in good old formal logic fashion both of those cases above, being factual descriptions, are true at once or are false at once.